Dedicated to remembering how it was “back then”, and Tales about the Eel River Valley, and the wisdom of the people that live there. With a big emphasis on; “Language has never been about correctness, it has always been about communicating”.
We live in one small bubble of place and time that peace is thought of as ideal, we should revel in it!
We cant judge what happened in history by who we are now.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

If you have Irish ancestry, I do, your folks may have been sold into slavery. Sound strange? Not as strange as it may seem if you know the history of the British Isles. The British and the Irish had no love for each other. Indeed, Oliver Cromwell advocated the complete extermination of the Irish. Many Irish slaves were supposedly sold in Jamaica and other British colonies. I say supposedly, because, as you know history is written by the survivors, so room for actual facts are much debated. Some people even doubt the Holocaust. Slavery was common in the world up until about the 1700s. Depending on what you term as "slavery", the Nazis had up to ten-million captives that were used as human medical experiments, used as labor in the Nazi factories and in the agriculture fields, most would call them slaves.

All of this is not to diminish the fact that America held blacks in slavery, and that fact is was very well documented, and seldom glossed over. Laws against slavery were passed in the British Isles in 1839 forbidding the selling of slaves, but there was still a good market for slaves in Jamaica long after those laws were passed. Just as many people today will do anything to make a buck, legal or not, I'm sure that the slave trade persisted long after laws were passed against it.

African Slaves were bought from African leaders that rounded up their own people to sell into the slave trade. The Irish were also famous as Slavers, as were the Dutch. It was much easier to get Irish slaves because most of them were criminals that the British rulers were glad to get rid of. The slave trade in Jamaica and Australia was mostly furnished from the British prisons. An Irish slave was only worth about one-tenth of what a black slave was worth. The Irish slaves were bred to the blacks to get a much higher quality slave. They felt that the blacks could work harder in the heat, and the Irish were used as cheap breeding stock. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It must have been horrible for everybody involved. The children automatically became slaves.

As I have said many times, we can't judge what happened in history by who we are today. We are all genetically the same people that lived two hundred years ago, but we are much better educated and we see the benefit of getting along with one another. Also, our laws are much more likely to be enforced. I often wonder what would happen to our nice cozy society if the law should happen to go away. Would that monster that lives inside us revert and make us the brutes we once were?

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

Monday, May 14, 2012

I support Estelle Fennell, so, I was looking for some of her campaign speeches and I came across a few things on youtube. The first ad that I have posted shows the county road that I live on, Blue Rock Road. There are worse chuckholes up the hill a little further, but this hole had the best lighting. It just goes to show you that you can be the star of the show by being in the right place at the right time. The holes around the corner are called "Charles Holes". (You can't call holes that big "Chuck")

So far the campaign has been very fair with a few remarkable exceptions made by both sides. The hit and run artists never sign their names or take credit. If they were truly expressing great wisdom you would think that they would be proud to take credit wouldn't they?

Estelle is a very good public speaker and is very good at making her point. She is practiced at digging out the story. Her experience came from her tenure as a news director and anchor person. She uses a microphone very well. She has had a life with a lot of obstacles that she has had to overcome, so she is very comfortable in a fair fight. When the local schools needed money she went with us to Sacramento to help get funding from the State. If we had not made the trip it is a sure thing that we would not have gotten the funding. She is not one to play the cards that were handed to her and chose the best option, she will ask for a better hand for us all.

I got to know Estelle years ago when she covered the Bear Lincoln story. As you may know, Bear Lincoln was the man that killed the Mendocino Sheriff Deputy in Covelo, then hid out. He finally turned himself in, but he pleaded self defense. Estelle and her news team went to Covelo to cover the story. Having been raised in Laytonville, I was familiar with some of the problems that they have in Covelo. I was very impressed with the detailed account of what happened, and what was happening in the valley with the Indian People. She was one of the first newspeople that treated the Indian people fairly. I liked her approach to not take the easy way out.

Later, I got to know her on the fire-line of many of the local wild-fires in the area, and most of the house fires. During the Canoe Fire, west of Weott, she stayed on the fire line and reported it's spread and the direction that it was traveling almost continuously on the news. It is my opinion that her reporting may have saved some houses, and may have even saved some lives. I really admired her dedication and the effort that she put out for her community. I became a lifelong fan of Estelle's at that point. She was elected as Garberville's Citizen of the year, mostly for her efforts on the Canoe Fire, but also in recognition of her dedication as a caring community supporter.

Now she is running for the Second District Supervisor of Humboldt County. Of course, she has my vote.

Friday, May 4, 2012

I ran across this while looking for a Jack White tune. It provokes a lot of heavy thinking on my part. I thought maybe I would let you try it. Click on the "X" in the box covering the captions at the bottom of the screen to get rid of it, or you won.t be able to read them.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Payback is a bitch, or so it seems. China has gained prospertity so fast that they don't understand restraint. They smoke too much, eat too much, and they don't exercize enough. Sounds a lot like America used to sound doesn't it?

Please click on the following video about China's new middle class obese. Most Americans have learned about moderation and at least try to restrict their food intake. The Chinese people relate obesity with prosperity. They do not yet fully understand the negitive health aspects of being overweight.

This post is a little shocking to me. When I was little, and didn't eat all of my dinner, my mother would tell me how lucky that I was that I was not one of the poor little kids in China that were starving to death.

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"I'm so tired of people substituting "values" for truth in a wide variety of situations. As a member of the reality-based community, I'd like to see reality used as the litmus test... " Jon Carrol

"The sound "squaw," regardless of its spelling, is OUR word for woman, and it is NOT to be used as an insult! When I hear it spoken by Native peoples, in its proper context, I hear the voices of the ancestors. I am reminded of powerful grandmothers who nurtured our people and fed the strangers, of proud women chiefs who stood up against them, and of mothers and daughters and sisters who still stand here today. In their honor I demand that our language, our women, and our history, be treated with respect.

Thank you for listening."
Wlibomkanni, travel well.

Quotes from Richard Dawkins:
...Anybody who thinks you need religion in order to be good is being good for the wrong reason. I’d rather be good for moral reasons. Morals were here before religion, and morals change rather rapidly in spite of religion. Even people who rely on the Bible use nonbiblical criteria. If your criteria are scriptural, you have no basis for choosing the verse that says turn the other cheek rather than the verse that says stone people to death. So you pick and choose without guidance from the Bible...

...I draw strength from reflecting on what a privilege it is to be alive and what a privilege it is to have a brain that’s capable in its limited way of understanding why I exist and of reveling in the beauty of the world and the beauty of the products of evolution. The magnificence of the universe and the sense of smallness that gives us in space and in geologically deep time is humbling but in a strangely comforting way. It’s nice to feel you’re part of a hugely bigger picture...
Richard Dawkins